Inside DiVitas

Thanks for the 6am wake-up call Gartner!

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

Our VP of marketing came to work grumpy the other day. It seems she got an unexpected 6am call on her personal mobile phone from a European Gartner Sales Rep. The guy robbed Nancy (our VPM) of an hour’s sleep and interrupted her personal time. Nancy gets to the office early, stays late and works hard … and she values her sleep. It’s easy to understand why she didn’t appreciate the work-related wake-up call. She asked the sales rep if he realized he was calling her at 6:00 a.m. No he said apologetically – he thought he was calling the east cost

To be fair, how was the poor Brit to know that Nancy didn’t work on the east coast anymore? The contact information he was using was actually for the company she worked for previously – which was headquartered in Florida. Clearly he thought it was a comfy 9am in her time zone, and safe to ring.

But the fact is this early-morning incident happened because, prior to DiVitas, Nancy’s personal mobile phone doubled as her primary business contact number. DiVitas makes you reachable by a single contact number whether you are in or away from your office – your deskphone. Folks who juggle both a mobile phone and deskphone leave it up to the caller to decide the best way to reach you. Given the choice, the safer bet is the mobile phone, since it follows you home (and you leave the deskphone on the desk). However if those callers opt for your mobile phone, and they get their time zones mixed up – as Gartner did with Nancy – the consequences are un-fun.

Coincidentally, I recently read an article lamenting this very problem, and I was really surprised that the advice was so dark ages (technology-wise). According to It’s a Wireless World , all you need to do is switch the damn Blackberry off after-hours so you won’t be bothered. The article quotes John McManus, the Commerce Department’s deputy chief information officer and CTO as complaining that mobile devices create new work/life issues. In fact, he refers to his phone as “the little demon device.”

McManus actually programs his mobile phone to turn itself off in the evening and on in the morning. In a nighttime emergency, his staff knows to reach him by using a traditional wireline phone rather than sending an e-mail message or a text message.

That sounds to me like a solution for getting some privacy, but not for solving business problems.

In any case, this wake-up call incident is, well, a wake-up call. It demonstrates why having a single contact number – like what DiVitas users have – is the best way to improve productivity while managing work/life balance.

DiVitas extends the deskphone capabilities to the mobile phone, enabling contact to be made to a DiVitas user consistently through their PBX extension. This makes reaching a DiVitas user anytime, anywhere consistent and straightforward. Now DiVitas users can place their corporate number on their business cards and be guaranteed not to miss important calls. And if that individual leaves the company – both sides win. Similar to deskphones, the company, not the individual, receives all future business calls placed to that number.

Having to juggle a Blackberry when you’re mobile, and a deskphone (with separate phone number) when you’re in-office, is far more confusing than being reachable by a single number, on a single device. Nancy used to be a multi-phone juggler – one in the office, one on her person – but not since working at DiVitas.

Nancy’s biggest challenge now? It’s not fretting about whether there was an urgent call she missed. Nope. If her phone rings after hours and the call appears to be important, she answers. If not, she doesn’t. Her challenging is simply to maintain her contact info from bygone days so she can be assured a good night’s sleep. That’s not so hard.

Is the Apple iPhone losing control?

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

Apple’s announcement this week of its iPhone enterprise play stirred up a lot of controversy. Tons of air-time was spent analyzing whether the popular-among-consumers iPhone is good enough to penetrate the corporate-mobile market forged by RIM.

Among the topics bandied about: Is the iPhone more reliable than the Blackberry (which has put users through several painful, nation-wide outages)? The answer to the reliability issue remains to be seen (but if iPhoners experience problems, I’m sure RIM will let us know).

And what about the iPhone’s new SDK? Apparently it has a major shortcoming, which is referred to by FierceMarkets as an “ominous limitation” because it “deliberately cripples third-party apps.” According to the FierceMobileEnterprise.com news site, Apple’s iPhone can only run one application at a time. This means functions – such as Instant Messaging (IM) – will be shut down when you swap to another task. Essentially you’d have to end your IM chat session to answer a call or browse the Web. Not so appealing if you are mid-IM-chat with an existing or prospective customer, right?

A stronger example of this limitation would be, let’s say, if a caller is mid SIP-VoIP call and a cellular call rolls in. The SIP call would actually die. BAD DESIGN Steve!

While these issues were interesting to read, I found a different topic regarding the consumer-centric iPhone to be also worth contemplating: Are corporate IT departments able to secure the iPhone and apply the kind of control required of a typical enterprise device?

Nope.

Apple seems to have lightly addressed some security issues, but management of these functions remain under end user (mobile worker) control. Basically, the iPhone has the same weak security-and-control services as a standard cellular phone.

In contrast, DiVitas puts all management of elements of the mobile-communications infrastructure in enterprise IT hands. This is because the brains of the DiVitas solution reside on-campus, in the corporate network. IT administrators can manage end user policy-compliance on call usage, network authentication, remote wipe (in the event of a lost device), etc. – just as they would with any mobile computer.

A consumer-centric approach, which puts that control in the end users hands, simply falls short of enterprise requirements.

The iPhone is still missing a lot of key features that you will find in an enterprise mobile solution like DiVitas. FMC is a biggie – as more dual-mode smartphones hit the market, the ability to roam transparently between WiFi and cellular will become a de facto enterprise need. Will Apple iPhone users ever be able to do that? That also remains to be seen, so we’ll save that discussion for another day.

The fact is that this week’s iPhone news is a good first enterprise-try on Apple’s part, and Apple is extremely good at making cool technology that works really well. But just as with its laptop, desktop and OS predecessors, the iPhone seems to be something that will once be more popular among consumers than businesses. Long on flash and short on substance.

NetEvents hot topic: FMC saves you money

By Gordon Young

Last month I got to do two of the things I love best. I hung out on the Mediterranean, and I talked about the benefits of DiVitas.

I was part of the DiVitas team that attended NetEvents held in Barcelona last month. This is an annual event for us where we update the European press on DiVitas news. I enjoy chatting with press, but for me, the highlight of the event was speaking on the FMC panel. The NetEvents keynote, given by British Telecom’s Rakesh Mahajan (a.k.a Rocky), centered on FMC. This topic was therefore a major topic of discussion at the event, giving the panel the momentum it needed for a lively discussion.

It was interesting having BT on the panel with me because it turned out that we are very much on the same page. At some junctions we have different methods for arguing the cost benefits of Mobile Unified Communications (DiVitas’ class of FMC). But in the end we are in agreement: Help businesses lower the bottom line.

As far as cost savings, DiVitas focuses on two benefits. One is the cost savings associated with FMC/Mobile UC due to reduced spending on mobile minutes and reduced international roaming costs. At the same time, we both (DiVitas and BT) like to highlight the productivity benefits associated with FMC/Mobile UC, which also results in cost savings. When workers are more reachable, they are more efficient and productive. And Mobile UC maximizes reachability for any employee – whether they are road warriors or corridor warriors.

It’s pretty easy to explain how Mobile UC lets companies save money on their cell bills and international roaming costs: use fewer minutes, make fewer international calls over the cellular network – save money.

It may take a bit longer to explain the productivity benefits, including how increasing reachability, efficiency and productivity can translate into money saved. But this is an easy explanation as well:

Take the healthcare industry as an example where increased productivity directly impacts the bottom line. Healthcare workers are highly mobile and they have a great need for voice and messaging access via WiFi. This is because hospitals have notoriously thick walls that render cell phones useless from inside the building. And WiFi provides an excellent mobile-network alternative.

Without Mobile UC, it can take nurses working inside a hospital up to 15 minutes to retrieve patient test results. First, nurses must find a desk phone in order to request test results. Then they must wait to be paged in order to be notified when results are ready. Once paged, they drop what they are doing and return to the desk phone to collect results.

In contrast, nurses using Mobile UC can shave as much as ten minutes off the same task. Dual-mode phones with WiFi access allows them to place a call from anywhere on the hospital campus. Here’s the math.

1) Requesting and retrieving patient results happens at least five times per day.

2) Nurses save at least 50 minutes per day.

3) In an average hospital with 800 nurses on duty per day, the result is a total savings of 650 hours per day.

BT and DiVitas agree that FMC lets you do more with less, which translates to cost savings. We just have a variety of ways of going about expressing that view point. I enjoyed being able to deliver the DiVitas viewpoint from such a fabulous location – all the while knowing I wouldn’t miss a call, thanks to my DiVitas mobile phone.